11 of the Most Bizarre Non-Circular Gears You Will Ever See

Gears don't always have to be round.

By
Eric Limer

Dec 23, 2015

When you think of gears, I bet you think of a bunch of circles. Sure they're covered in little teeth and maybe some are bigger than others, but they're still mostly circles. Well prepare to meet a whole bunch of weirdo gears that have no need for that little limitation.

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1Cube gears

Designed and 3D-printed by the folks at Stratasys, this cube actually comes out of the printer fully assembled. As you can see, each of its corner gears has your typical round parts, but the business sides are closer to quarter-spheres than circles. And then the rest is all sharp angles. This cube is not particularly good at anything other than looking cool, but it's pretty good at that.

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2Nautilus gears

Instead of being totally round, these gears take their cue from the Fibonacci spiral. The result is that at the very end of a rotation, the two big flat sides hit against each other before the next turn starts. It's another mostly pointless exercise, but these gears do exhibit an interesting quality: If one gear is moving at a constant speed, the other will speed up and slow down during the course of its rotation. That's gotta be good for something, right?

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3Oval gears

Oval gears like these have a practical use in devices like mechanical flowmeters. The way the two gears intersect in a T-shape creates two distinct pockets of space. If the gears fit together well enough, these pockets can be completely watertight so that when liquid passes through the flowmeter, you can use the volume of the pockets the gears create combined with the number of rotations to calculate the volume of liquid that's passed through the device.

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4Spherical gears

These weird half-sphere gears are the work of one Oskar van Deventer, a prolific YouTuber who designs a ton of strange gear mechanisms basically just for the fun of it. While Oskar's little toy here is basically just a goof, it does have the interesting capability to fold 180-degrees like a hinge while the gears stay interlocked and spin on a perpendicular axis.

As Oskar notes, it's basically a solution in search of a problem, but it's still pretty rad.

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5Vaguely bean-shaped gears on an old pump

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on here without more context, but like the nautilus gears above, these strangely shaped gears transform the steady torque that powers the gears into something a little more irregular. Probably the slow drawback of a plunger and then a quick push out.

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6Irregular alien gears

It's impossible to even describe how these gears are shaped, but despite their strange and uncanny appearance, these bespoke gears actually function just like any normal pair of circular gears with uniform teeth.

Perhaps more interesting than the gears themselves is the tracing process used to create them, which will flawlessly generate an endless number of alien-looking, hard-to-replace gears that work just as well as something more boring and more practical.

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7A circular gear inside an oval gear

Yes, the gear inside here is relatively normal, other than the fact that it only has teeth on about a quarter of it. Meanwhile, the oval-shaped inside out-ish gear makes the pair something called a "rack and pinion."

This pairing comes in all kinds of different forms but generally includes one circular gear and one long, straight, toothed beam. The result is that the continual circular motion of the traditional gear can be turned into linear movement.

As you can see, the apparatus transforms the steady turn of the inside gear into a tick-tock back-and-forth.

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8Rectangle gears

Another interesting mechanism with no real application, this trio of interlocking pieces is a rectangular version of a mathematical phenomenon called"Borromean rings." It's also a sequence of three identical gears that can move when they're all connected, which isn't usually the case. A fun little curiosity, but they don't serve a purpose other than just being fun to fiddle with.

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9Cube gears in a gyroscope thing

This 3D-printable rig puts a cube of gears like the one we saw above inside another set of gears that spins some concentric circles around them like some crazy gyroscope. Another mostly useless setup, but a neat one that looks like it might rip a hole in spacetime if you got it spinning fast enough.

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10Donut gears

Yet another art piece, this system of gears includes three inseparable and interconnected donut-shaped guys, all powered by a single corkscrew spindle that juts up through the center of the whole thing. Not a lot of practical application here, but it's a fun little desk ornament.

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11"Magic" worm gears

Another invention of Oskar van Deventer, these strange worm-like gears have a hidden superpower. When oriented one way, the outside two spin in the same direction while the middle one spins in the opposite direction, like a normal trio of gears. But when you flip them around just right, all three can interlock and spin in the same direction. How? Well, it's best to let the master explain:

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